A ritual. Half an orange crescent, its powdery edge softened by water, down into its acidic demise. A prayer is said as the bright light ceases, its rays no longer blinding, in the hopes that the orange crescent provides respite.
Under the surface looms a creature so tormented, every vocalization grates its ears, every motion slices its skin. It too finds the silence deafeningly painful and recesses into its den near the entry to its abyss — the light does not reach it down here, but it dare not look up. The entry itself lets in a breeze, sometimes freezing, sometimes blazing, and the caverns turn the wind into whispers, only dotted by the occasional droplet from the damp fleshy ropes hanging from the walls. They writhe at times, it feels inevitable that they will begin to do so now.
This, too, is prayed against.
The creature remembers a moment in its humanoid host’s life — a curious sound of water dripping as from a faucet beyond the walls. Contemplation and concern as they stood still. The water stopped, as if the handle of this non-existent faucet had been turned by another person, but the only ones around were slumbering. Paranoia set in as the shadows in the edge of dark areas of their home began to dance.
Writhing, persistent discomfort from the stimuli of sounds, sensations, an interminable itching under the skull. This was all explainable, the water was simply running through the pipes, there is no additional shadow creature behind the walls…although perhaps there was space for one on the lower floor. The overwhelming cacophony of the external world was just as easily explained, although a harder fight to win. So the reach for the orange crescent. A circle normally, it is broken in half, rarely is the other half needed. Perhaps it would be, lest the host turn about and wonder why it was not working, suffering longer under the effects brought on by the tormented creature until exhaustion would take them.
Cavernous depths breed familiarity. Darkness, shifting temperature, whispers from the shadow. In retiring to it, the creature accepts its fate, and the host cannot fight looming damnation. They hope only to escape briefly through slumber of their own, aided by the orange crescent, the prayer to the body in which both creatures exist to succumb to partial death.
Sense begins to fade already — the orange crescent itself takes its time but a slow descent into the confusion and exhaustion it bolsters has begun. Sese ad somnum. Cum fortuna, cras pax.
